Some tweets age better than others. For example, Jack Dorsey’s tweet, posted after he’d agreed to sell his social media platform, Twitter, to Elon Musk in 2022 hasn’t really stood the test of time. “Elon is the singular solution I trust”, he wrote. Musk repaid that trust by symbolically slaughtering Dorsey’s little blue bird and replacing it with a literal and metaphorical iron cross. In just over two years, he’s turned a flawed but fascinating experiment in human communication into a rancid cyber-sewer, littered with fascists, incels, conspiracy theorists and unblockable Temu adverts. A singular solution indeed.
But how did we get here? The BBC’s new documentary Twitter: Breaking the Bird attempts to answer this. It’s bizarre to contemplate this now but there was a time when tech innovators weren’t considered by some to be menaces to society, threats to freedom and amplifiers of evil. In fact, there was a time when they were widely viewed as exactly the opposite. Many people genuinely hoped that sites like Twitter and Facebook might represent the democratisation of discourse and even a step forward in human evolution.
